Joseph MacKinnon > Joseph's Quotes

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

“Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“There are more kinds of fools than one can guard against.”
― Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

“Don't put one foot in your job and the other in your dream, Ed. Go ahead and quit, or resign yourself to this life. It's just too much of a temptation for fate to split you right up the middle before you've made up your mind which way to go.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

“He struggled with himself, too. I saw it -- I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.”
― Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer and other stories

“We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“There is nothing in the understanding which has not come from the senses, except the understanding itself, or the one who understands.”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Essays

“This is the best of all possible worlds.”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”
― Philip K. Dick

“A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

“I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
― William Faulkner, Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance Speech, 1949

“The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.”
― William Faulkner

“The simplification of anything is always sensational.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust and ambition look ahead.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“You die and you die and then you are beyond death.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“In civilised life domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper (the words are not offensive) but in such a voice, or at such a moment, that they are not far short of a blow in the face.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“We live as we dream--alone....”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness.”
― Philip K. Dick

“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.”
― Philip K. Dick

“There is a face beneath this mask, but it isn't me. I'm no more that face than I am the muscles beneath it, or the bones beneath that.”
― Steve Moore, V for Vendetta

“It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness